Cruising World, Alvah Simon and Hood Canal Shrimp.

JK, on May 6th, 2010

Spot Shrimp. Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife

Stopping by the bulletin board on the top of C Dock, I happened on a posting for a shrimp pot being sold by Alavah or Diana Simon on the Roger Henry. I had seen Roger Henry first on the dock waiting to be pulled and then sitting on the hard by the fence near the parking. She’s a metal boat, French designed with a very purposeful, long-distance look, that look that says I’ve done a lot of sea miles and I’m ready to do so more. Today. Very deep V-shaped bow section that looks like she wouldn’t pound in a seaway, going back to a flatter aft section. The names Alvah Simon and Roger Henry seemed somehow familiar and it turns out he’s a columnist for Cruising World magazine. From this article it would appear that we may be one his last stops before he sets off for New Zealand.

If you are interested in a shrimp pot, this might be a good time to get one. According to the posting on the People for Puget Sound blog by Dick Wood, “Enjoy the Sound: Hood Canal Shrimp”, the Hood Canal shrimp season lasts four hours, from 9:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. on the first two Saturdays and Wednesdays in May (see area 12 in the regs).

The first thing we realized after setting our two pots was that shrimping was going to be a lot like baseball. Long periods of inactivity, followed by short bursts of frenzy. The second thing we realized was that three beers in the cooler weren’t going to be nearly enough to last until 1:00.

Almost all of the boats around us had some type of winch, either electric or gasoline-engine powered, to pull the pots. We had a crude pulley hanging off the end of the downrigger. I’m not sure our rig did any good. We had four hundred feet of line on the pots and pulled it in hand over hand when we retrieved the first pot after forty minutes. Out of the water it came and we swung it onto the rear transom. The floor of the pot was covered with flopping jumping shrimp. We pulled 27 out of the first pot, which was more than the total number of shrimp I had caught previously in my whole life. And the shrimp were huge spot prawns, measuring five to six inches from the tip of the sharp nose to the tail.